Bethel University Physician Assistant Program

Their Story

The Bethel University Master of Science in Physician Assistant program, located in St. Paul, Minnesota, aims to provide their students with knowledge to practice with “compassion, competence, and confidence.” The university started as a seminary in 1871 and prides itself as a leader in higher education that reflects a Christian worldview, and emphasizes the impact of its students’ contributions to the community. Bethel has a 27-month program that offers small class sizes to prepare their students to give patients meaningful medical care.

The program’s Medical Director, Dr. Dan Leafblad, had two main goals when the program started discussions with AllofE: coordinating the work they do with clinical sites and the associated documentation, and coordinating and automating the student scheduling process. After conferring with other PA programs about how they were using the entire eMedley solution suite, Bethel decided to implement not only the eMedley clinical systems (eKeeper, eduSched, eCLAS, and eValuate), but also eCurriculum and ExamN. They really wanted to be able to see how the students were learning and performing from the time they entered the program until they were ready to graduate and start practicing as Physician Assistants.

The Solution

eCurriculum

Christy Hanson, a Bethel administrator, worked closely with her faculty to gather existing course curriculum documents and is working on mapping their course objectives to their standards, competencies, and board topics. To make her job easier, AllofE preloaded in existing course curriculum, Accreditation Standards, Competencies, Blueprints and Medical Topics to map into curriculum. The Physician Assistant program is now able to view reports across all of their curriculum on where content is covered, when it is covered, who is covering it, and how it being covered. They can also perform curriculum searches and see gaps and overlaps related to the Standards, Competencies, Blueprints, and Medical Topics.

ExamN

The administrators at Bethel needed a way to manage and organize items of all types, and ExamN was AllofE’s solution to that. ExamN supports many types of questions including multiple-choice, open ended, performance based questions, and more. It saves time by automatically grading multiple choice and short answer questions as well as allowing their instructors to use grading rubrics when grading open response assessments. Instructors can also report on student performance in relation to competencies and topics across all of the program’s assessments. ExamN provides many other features including detailed item analyses, reliability analyses, score correlations, and competency based reporting dashboards.

eValuate

Bethel experienced a smooth transition when they began using eValuate thanks to the AllofE team. All of their existing evaluations forms were pre-built into eValuate. eValuate automates the evaluation process and automatically reminds users when it is time to fill out their next evaluation. It allows them to administer performance based evaluations, clinical assessments and evaluations, as well as practical hands on assessments. It allows them to report on criteria grouped by competencies such as Systems-Based Practice, Interpersonal and Communication Skills, and Medical Knowledge. Since Bethel also implemented ExamN, their program can track student performance to see how students perform across the board on competencies and topics from a knowledge level on exams to an application level on performance-based evaluations.

eCLAS

The AllofE team worked closely with Denise Brecheisen to gather the PA program’s existing forms, documents, and evaluations. They worked together to identify and define reporting and tracking needs as well as requirements for their program so that eClas’s capabilities could be maximized for their specific program. eClas automated their case logging, time logging, student clinical experience tracking, as well as reporting. Since they also use eValuate, they were able to integrate their evaluations to track performance related to their clinical experiences as well. eClas reporting then tallies all information automatically and generates reports showing requirements, what students have already completed, and what they still need to complete. eClas provides a wide array of reports and dashboards to allow the Bethel PA program to showcase its students’ experiences.

EduSched

EduShed automated Bethe’s scheduling process by allowing students to choose site preferences based on availability, location, and rotations offered. AllofE worked closely with Denise Brecheisen to define schedule periods for students’ rotations and pick the best scheduling tools for their university. They chose to use lottery scheduling which places students automatically then afterwards allows the program’s clinical team to use a schedule planner to adjust the students’ schedules and keep notes on the status of each one before it is published to students. Their team can also keep track of students’ past and future rotations all in one colorful and easy-to-use interface.

The Effect

Implementing the eMedley platform with eCurriculum, ExamN, eValuate, eClas, and EduSched, provided the Physician Assistant Program at Bethel University immediately with an efficient and centralized solution. The fully integrated health science solution suite allowed them to control and access their curriculum, scheduling, evaluations, and assessments all in one convenient, easy-to-use place.